Remember When
Moonlighting NASA Engineers Say They've Created a Rocket Better Than NASA's
The debate reflects disagreement over the direction of U.S. spaceflight as NASA prepares to retire the shuttle in 2010. By 2015, the agency plans to begin orbital flights with Ares I and a companion heavy-lift cargo rocket, Ares V. Officials hope to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.
Astronauts will ride into orbit in a capsule aboard the Ares I, which will have a modified shuttle booster rocket at its core. They will dock with a lunar stage that was carried aloft separately by an Ares V rocket and head to the moon.
The Jupiter design would also require two separate launches to get to the moon, but its rockets would both rely on a shuttle external tank at their center.
Besides being a simpler, more powerful system, backers say, the Jupiter rockets would save NASA $19 billion in development costs and another $16 billion in operating costs over two decades.
The Government Accountability Office last year raised questions about the cost of NASA's current plan for returning to the moon, which a report estimated at $230 billion over 20 years. NASA said it already has spent about $7 billion on Ares.
I will say, they can stretch a dollar over at NASA, as compared to other governmental departments:
NASA- 18 Billion
Dept. of Agriculture- 94 Billion
Dept. of Education- 59 Billion
Housing and Urban Development- 47 Billion
EPA- 8 billion
and my favorite..Social Security- 694 Billion (just threw for shock value)
IMO they have lost some focus and need to get back to the real science of space exploration. If we had kept up with our programs instead of going low Earth orbit for the past 25 years, we could be on Mars by now.
posted by davis14633 at 06:15
3 Comments:
It only took around a decade to make it to the moon the first time. I realize the rocket design started earlier but the first manned space flight was in 1961. We were on the moon by 1969. We have way better manufacturing and technology these days. NASA should be able to put people on the moon with just a few months notice. I have little doubt that if you give a corporation a few billion on the condition that they get to the moon by next year they'll do it.
Power generation should have already been moved to outer space. We should have long since built an observatory on the moon. There's a good sized list of what should have been done in the past 35 years. We need to get off our keester and make some real progress.
We have the ability to expand to the stars yet we continue to squat where we are. Why expand some might ask. Right now we are a grenade target. If anything happens to the earth we're toast. So for the longterm perpetuation of mankind we need to get going.
I won't bid work at the Johnson Space Center any more. That's because they spec either weird equipment that is only manufactured by one company in the world, or more often the very tip-top of the line of every product. Contrast this with my experience in the Marine Corps, where every single piece of mission-critical equipment was second-hand.
I understand why space rockets have to be built with the very best components, but that mentality has extended into everything they do, right down to constructing restrooms and buying photocopiers. What NASA needs is to be privatized. A real manager who has to turn a profit will immediately throw out all those over-the-top specifications and get them down to industrial norms. Then we'd see some real progress -- and probably fewer exploding space buses.
I have to say that NASA has deteriorated to a standard government beauracracy. They are no longer interested in pushing the envelope, they're just protecting the budget. The "International Space Station" is nothing morevthan a hole in the sky to throw money at. Either privatise it or shut it down. The last major advancement generated by NASA was TANG.
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